Bae Doona

Bae Doona (Korean: 배두나; born October 11, 1979; also credited as Doona Bae), is a South Korean actress and photographer. She became known outside Korea for her roles as a political activist in Park Chan-wook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), archer Park Nam-joo in Bong Joon-ho's The Host (2006), and as the doll in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll (2009). She has had English-speaking roles in the Wachowski films Cloud Atlas (2012) and Jupiter Ascending (2015), as well as their Netflix television series Sense8 (2015–2018). As for her Korean-speaking roles, she is well known for playing the leading female character in the Netflix period zombie thriller, Kingdom (2019–present), as well as the crime thriller Stranger (2017-2020) and sci-fi The Silent Sea. Bae Doona was born in Seoul, South Korea. Growing up, she would follow her mother, Kim Hwa-young, a stage actress, to theater and rehearsal halls, learning lines of dialogue as she went along. This did not initially lead her toward acting, saying: "People might say that since my mother is a theater actor, I became an actress. But to me, those experiences probably had the opposite effect. On the contrary, because I saw many great actors working with my mother, I thought this was a job only people with extraordinary talent could do." A Konkuk University student in 1998, she was scouted by a modeling agency in Seoul. This led to her modeling of clothing for COOLDOG's catalog, among others. In 1999, she switched to acting before completing her studies at university, debuting in the TV drama School. Later that year, she appeared as the ghost in The Ring Virus, a Korean remake of the Japanese horror film Ring.